My friend Jinni is finishing her master’s degree here and moving to California for her enrollment in the doctoral program at UC Davis, so I invited her and our mutual friend Zach over for a little farewell get-together. I cooked samosas, seafood pizza tteokbokki (the dish that I practiced last week), sesame seared tuna salad with wasabi mayo, miso onigiri, beef curry, etc. It was a feast! And I certainly wanted to take an advantage of the fact that Jinni speaks fluent Japanese and asked her to translate and narrate my cooking instructions into Japanese, but I think it was too much. We were switching back and forth between Japanese, Korean, and English and kept laughing.

Anyway, after finishing cooking the salad and tteokbokki, we brought them out to the patio and ate there in the sun. It was a fun time.

I was just hanging at home and thinking of what to eat. Well, “Tteokbokki” came to my mind. Yet, regular Tteokbokki is a bit boring to me, so I thought I would be creative and experimental by adding tomato/marinara sauce and some mozzarella cheese to make Italian-Korean fusion Tteokbokki. To my surprise, it turned out really good.

Northampton is a small town with the population of only about 30,000, yet it has been far more liberal than any other rural/small towns of the U.S. and we have been hosting PRIDE parade events for almost the past 28 years. In this year’s event, I joined Scott and David who was visiting from Vermont for the event and saw a number of signs against the anti-immigration legislation that the state of Arizona recently passed. I believe that it is important that we as queers recognize that immigration rights and gay rights are ultimately linked.

After the parade, we headed over to Herrel’s Ice Cream and then to the Northampton Brewer to get some ice cream and beer to cool off ourselves on a hot May day.

My friend JP and I were driving through downtown Northampton and I recorded the scene. I edited the video with the 80s classic arcade game “Rally-X” theme. The soundtrack is so addictive. Incidentally when I added the sound to the video, it kind of fit. What do you think?

I am developing a recipe, inspired by the famous Kogi BBQ Truck tacos in Los Angeles. It is for my friend’s visit this weekend (or next weekend). It is what I call ‘Kimchi Bulgogi Taco’ (김치 불고기 타코 or KBT), a fusion of Korean and Mexican foods. I’m going to have regular Korean BBQ beef (bulgogi or 불고기) and also spicy beef (고추장 불고기) for my friend’s visit, but for now I’m only trying out the regular bulgogi tacos. So far it tastes good. I am thinking that to enhance the BBQ flavor, I should use less chili sauce and use more fresh kimchi, rather than old sour kimchi.

Kogi BBQ Truck was the hottest thing that hit the streets of Los Angeles while I was there in summer last year. Maybe it is still popular. I forgot about it and then recently saw a news show featuring their tacos. Yuumm…

David got an infection from his oral surgery (wisdom tooth extraction) and could not come down to see me for the weekend. I am bummed about it because I have been looking forward to it for the past two weeks. He is sorry and we are setting up a time to meet next time.

He likes my town. So I decided to make a video that showcases the town. The other day I hung out at a little cafe in front of the city hall (the building on the right) and just let my camera roll. It was the first warm day/evening of the year and lots of people were out even though it was not a weekend. I enjoyed people-watching. My friend Scott (the guy in the red t-shirt) ran into me and stood in front of the camera for a few minutes, not realizing that the camera was on. Once I told him what I was doing, he chuckled and bent over to give a little cheesy smile.

배경 음악은 에픽하이의 새 앨범 “에필로그”중 “서랍”이라는 곡이다.

“Seorob” [“A drawer”] from Epik High’s new album “Epilogue” has been used as the background music for the video.